“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
–Victor Hugo
Frank Zappa famously said that “There is more stupidity around than hydrogen and it has a longer shelf life.” The stupidity of those who yet insist that Islam is a religion of peace—that Islam does not create the terrorist, that terrorism is tangential from Islam proper, that Islam is not anti-Jewish—has an amazing shelf life. That these preposterous and reality-defying claims are still being made today is, as I have written many times before, indicative of the incredible lengths that some will go to exculpate a religion that is totally undeserving of such mitigation. If it can be said that Christianity was complicit in precipitating the Holocaust, it can also be said that Islam is complicit in precipitating an eerily similar anti-Jewish hatred—in the form of Islamist terrorism and anti-Israel propaganda. Anyone delving into the history of antisemitism will discover that Martin Luther was essentially a bald-faced anti-Jewish bigot. They will discover also that the Prophet Mohammed was essentially a bald-faced anti-Jewish bigot. And just as a majority of Christians continue to pose, erroneously, Luther’s anti-Jewish hatred as merely contextual, so a majority of Muslims present the Prophet Mohammed’s anti-Jewish hatred in the same exculpatory light.
I’ve always felt contempt for the taboos protecting any religion from criticism, even from excoriation. This contempt puts me in league with those atheists who are not only brave enough to defy the gods of men, but are also quite willing to prove their mettle by exposing the foolish timidity and eccentric disposition of religious quacks. Atheists are rightly offended by those religious who are not in the least discomposed by the buggering of little boys yet are, oddly enough, unhinged by the idea of women taking up the Catholic priesthood. Atheists easily perceive the contradiction in the fact that Muslims around the world are entranced into violence by mere caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed but are otherwise inured to the spectacle of the public decapitation of Christian children of Mosul at the hands of their ISIS captors. Atheists were not surprised, therefore, to discover that an online Al Jazeera poll, taken in the Arab Middle East in May 2015, found that 81% of those Muslims queried supported ISIS and their imperialistic adventures. One can understand how Christopher Hitchens, perhaps the most articulate atheist of all time, once remarked that Islam was “the most depraved” of all religions.
Amazing how our governments and media elite can obtrude abortion and same-sex marriage into the democratic tradition, but we have such difficulty accepting the reality that Islam the religion is actually the real source of terrorist and anti-Jewish violence. In a piece I wrote long ago, I referred to Islam as the “Teflon religion.” This appellation holds true today. Why are we so hesitant to profile the crimes of this religion as having a direct connection to the ruthless precedents found within the Quran? Why are we always looking for ways to deflect the blame from this religion that it so rightly deserves? I believe we have adopted this exculpatory stratagem precisely because its crimes are so many and because the religious monsters committing these crimes continue to insist they are driven to such extremes exclusively by the tenets of Islam proper. “If everyone says so, it must be true,” counsels the Yiddish proverb. Western governments and the media elites who cook up their “accommodation” policies would do well to hearken to this wisdom.
Equating Judaism and Christianity with Islam is an idea that never should have found traction in the Western world. In the Muslim world, the belief that Judaism and Christianity are obsolesced by Islam was born a religious imperative and has now become a cultural norm. Quite a contradistinction to Western pluralists and their foolish, bromidic insistence that Islam should be given equal status in a society whose cultural traditions Muslim activists never tire of calumniating and traducing. We would be much wiser—and much safer—were we to adopt the Muslim Middle Eastern standard which, in our present situation, would necessitate that Islam the religion be officially designated as a dangerous ideology solely because the behavioural tendencies of its adherents are quite extraneous to our societal norms. We must never accept that Muslim zealots shooting AK47s at cartoonists, or travelling to Syria to participate in an Islamic bloodbath, could ever become a thread in the Western democratic fabric.
Islam the religion is not applicable to the Western world; is not relevant to the Western world: This is an idea whose time has come. We have suffered enough because of this insalubrious religion. We have dodged the bullet too many times now to ever again give this jihadist leviathan the benefit of the doubt. “Time is a great teacher,” wrote Hector Berlioz, “but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.” How many more innocent people (Muslims included) must die only because we have not the noetic fortitude or the moral courage to toss this idol of violence and anti-Jewish hatred into the dustbin of failed human inventions? Does it take an Iranian nuclear weapon exploding in Tel Aviv for the rest of the world to finally wake up to the reality that Islam is not a religion of peace and never will be?
Christopher Hitchens (I am still listening to you, my friend) wrote, “Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational.” Hence, fools like David Cameron proclaim Islam to be “a religion of peace”—even as innocent Britons are shot dead as they lay sun-bathing on beach towels in Tunisia—and its jihadist theme is given breathing room in our midst. Atheists are laughing at us, and so are ISIS, but for entirely different reasons.